Travel tips-Restaurant reviews-Recipes
I’d only been to The Barbary once before and was quite surprised when I checked on this blog to find it was as long ago as 2016 – a few weeks after it opened. As ‘little sister’ to the wonderful The Palomar – one of my favourite restaurants – and receiving great reviews, it couldn’t […]
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The Easter holidays have begun and I always like to take the boys – my son’s eldest two, Freddie (10) and Ben (7) – for an outing. It’s fun for me – and it always seems fun for them too! Of late, we’ve combined some kind of cultural – art/museum/theatre – visit with a meal […]
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Malaga is a great choice for a short break early in the year as it’s one of the warmest places in mainland Europe in the winter/spring time. Last time I was there in January 2020 the weather was lovely and sunny – though with some rain – and temperatures in the late teens, but I […]
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This is the kind of post that usually gets published around new year, looking back on the best of the previous year. However, I had a busy start to 2025 – family and work – and so a look back on 2024 passed me by. Now spring is on our doorstep (not officially with us […]
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I was lucky with the weather again. Just as the sun shone – albeit on still an icy cold winter’s day – when I headed into central London for The Nutcracker last week, the almost constant grey skies parted yesterday to reveal another gloriously blue sky for my trip to London’s Fitzrovia. My friend Sharon […]
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After lots of damp and foggy weather over the Christmas period, it was lovely to wake to a bright, sunny day yesterday. I had tickets to take grandsons Freddie (9) and Ben (7) to The Nutcracker at the London Coliseum. I took Freddie last January but Ben would join us this year. (There’s a minimum […]
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‘A wonder to behold’ Telegraph ‘A joyful, bravura piece of stagecraft’ London Evening Standard ‘A magical revival’ The Times ******** My eldest grandson Freddie (9) is showing an interest in theatre, which is wonderful, and a few weeks’ ago I promised to find out what was on at […]
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It’s a first for me to review a book I’ve worked on professionally as an editor. However, copy-editing Lady Glenconner’s Picnic Papers was such a delight, I couldn’t resist sharing it with you – especially as there is, of course, a lot about food in this book. A book about picnics has to include food: […]
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We were running out of chutney. The Green Tomato Chutney I made in September was almost gone. Although I shared Katie Stewart’s advice to wait a month before eating the chutney to allow it to mature, the family barely managed a week. Grandsons Freddie (9) and Ben (6), who’d initially been sceptical that anything made […]
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I’m just back from visiting my daughter for a couple of days. She lives in Worcestershire, about a 20-minute drive from the county’s capital, Worcester. We’ve never been into the city itself much in the years she’s lived there, but now 6-year-old grandson Rufus attends one of the Pauline Quirke Academies for a drama class […]
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